‘Come along now, Denzil,’ called Brian. ‘We’re ready to start.’
Denzil showed no sign of having heard nor did Brian expect him to, for from the beginning he had made it plain that his
modus operandi
would be one of democratic openness. He knew that to assert the dialectic of belonging they needed to erase the official academic landscape and impose their own. Their meetings were not to be class/teacher confrontations but periods of adventurous exploration during which they would all reach out and spontaneously reveal their dreams, longings and frustrations which Brian would then shape and organise into a full-length drama provisionally entitled
Slangwhang For Five Mute Voices
.
This was scheduled to be seen at the close of the spring term - a fact that was already causing him considerable anxiety. Although the group undoubtedly had a great relish for dramatic expression (once they got going) and threw themselves with vigour and imaginative energy into all the improvisations, they were simply not interested in learning lines. In vain would Brian take home his rehearsal tape, extract the obscenities, massage the rest into some sort of coherent shape and transfer it to Mandy’s Amstrad. The group would accept the thin, perforated sheets, stuff them into the pockets of their jeans with discouraging nonchalance and ignore them thereafter.
Now Brian asked if anyone had had time to look over the results of the previous week’s work. Denzil, lowering himself slowly, said, ‘Yeah.’
‘How did it feel?’
‘Absorbent, man. Really absorbent.’
He hung an inch from the floor exciting deltoids which bulged like coconuts beneath grey, unhealthy skin, then dropped. Noiselessly. The others applauded. Denzil put a hand mockingly on his chest and dipped his shaven skull. A spider crouched in the very centre, the navy-blue threads of its web woven over his skull and disappearing down the neck of his Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The words ‘CUT HERE’ were tattooed around the base of his throat. He strolled over to join the others, taking his time. ‘I reckon I could’ve been a trapeze artist - given the luck.’
‘Right! Warm-up time, you lot,’ cried Brian in a rushy, foolish voice. He started running on the spot, shaking his arms and legs about and rolling his head.
Denzil stood in front of Edie Carter, straddled his legs and mimed playing a guitar, rhythmically thrusting his pelvis into her face. Sluggishly two of the others got up. Collar, so called because he could not bear anything touching his neck, started shadow boxing. Little Boreham, weedily hopeless but dressed like an Olympic athlete, did a few shallow and uncertain press-ups.
Edie and her brother continued to sit, back to back, like a pair of exquisitely carved, beautifully decorated bookends. In profile their faces appeared almost identical (they were born on the same day) but Tom’s jaw was a little more prominent and heavier. They had long, thick, curling hair the colour of marmalade, exquisitely shaped noses and high, marbly-white foreheads like the children in Tudor paintings.
Brian looked forward eagerly each day to his first sighting of the Carter twins, for they constantly re-styled and re-invented themselves and never looked the same twice. Their dazzling skins, thick and smooth like cream, seemed, like blank canvases, to be crying out for decoration. They dressed, as small children would if left to themselves, in an assortment of unrelated finery. Today Edie wore a foamy scarlet RaRa topped with shreds of silk and lace and a banana-coloured sweat shirt full of holes. Tom was in jeans resembling pale blue shredded wheat and an American Repro jacket stencilled with midnight hags and burning cities and comic-book expletives.
‘Come on you two,’ called Brian.
Edie parted her rich carnation lips, flickered out her tongue, drew it in again. And smiled. Brian turned quickly away and began shadow boxing with Collar, much to the latter’s resentment.
When the group had first been formed Brian, very heavily into non-verbal communication, had encouraged everyone to sit around in a circle holding hands with their eyes closed. Next had come various physical exercises leading to a full class workout. These had been discontinued when Brian, wrestling on the floor with Collar, had accidentally touched his neck, receiving in return a clout across the ear that had made his head fizz for a week.
‘OK. Gather round, earthlings.’
Brian sat down in a single but rapidly accelerating movement. The twins turned towards him and smiled. Brian, faint with excitement and desire, smiled back. He could never decide which was the more beautiful, for he was equally besotted with them both.
‘Now,’ he said briskly, ‘where had we got to last week?’
No one remembered. Brian held the pause, nodding interrogatively at them all in turn for all the world, as Collar said afterwards, like the daft dog in the back of his mum’s Escort.
‘Was it . . .’ Boreham puckered his brow, ‘the bit where Denzil went down the Social and got in that fight with a Paki?’
‘No,’ said Brian shortly. He was keenly aware of the ethnic imbalance in his group and had tried in vain to remedy the matter. No non-white person was interested in joining, possibly because of Denzil, who could be seen every Saturday in Causton High Street enthusiastically selling the
British Nationalist Magazine
on behalf of the BNP.
‘That were good. We could do that one again.’
‘No, we couldn’t.’ Brian was beginning to feel depressed. All the improvisations, no matter how pacific their inception, quickly became confrontational. Everyone it seemed loved rows and while there was no doubt that they were good theatre even Brian, inexperienced director/devisor that he was, could see that each violent highlight needed to be cushioned by a tranquil low light if the whole thing wasn’t going to explode in everyone’s faces.
‘I remember.’ Edie swivelled to face him, legs apart, elbows resting on her knees. ‘My bit I mean. From last week.’
‘She remembers, Bri,’ said Tom, taking pride. He winked, lowering an eyelid brilliantly adorned with red and blue flowers. Brian had long been agitatedly concerned over Tom’s eyelids. As far as he could see the pattern never varied by as much as a petal’s fall. The vivid colours were never smudged. The thought had struck him once that the lids might be tattooed, that this was some test of high machismo that only the greatly brave essayed. He’d never had the nerve to ask.
‘Excellent. So what was the situation? Listen everyone.’ Brian clapped his hands.
‘I were this woman that got really mad at her husband.’
‘And do you remember why, Edie?’
‘Yeah. ’Cause he were married to me and knocking somebody else about.’
‘Ah.’
‘So I go: “Eat shit, scumbag. Piss off to the fat old slag. See if I care. And take your stinking dog with you.” He had this pit bull, y’see.’
‘Bor could be the dog,’ said Collar.
‘Bloody ain’t.’ The royal-blue track suit rolled into a tight ball, like a hedgehog.
‘He’s little enough,’ Denzil grinned. ‘Trouble is, he’d never bite anybody. ’Cause he’s chicken - aincha, Bor?’
‘No!’ Boreham screwed up his eyes and folded his arms around his head.
‘Chicken . . . chicken. Kwaa . . . kwaa . . .’ Denzil and Collar began to walk around, arms winged, moving in sharp, quick little jerks. Cast down glances darted everywhere. Feet, booted and sneakered, were slowly lifted and put down again with splayed out, finicky precision. It was very funny and, considering their sole experience of the real thing had been via Iceland’s frozen-food cabinet, amazingly accurate.
Brian hugged himself, rocking backwards and forwards on his non-existent bottom at these inventive and exuberant
ad hoc
measures. Then Denzil pecked Collar, who flapped his arms wildly in response and started to run about in all directions, squawking loudly.
Brian climbed wearily to his feet. Clapping his hands yet again and with much the same effect, he called: ‘OK. Kill the impro. That’s enough.’
Plainly it was not. The fowl play continued. Boreham, seeing his teasing compatriots were safely engaged elsewhere, decided after all to occupy the role of pit bull. He ran on all fours to where Brian was standing and started savaging his trousers.
‘Stop that, Boreham.’ Then, thinking a jovial note might restore the status quo, ‘Down boy!’ Little Bor lifted his leg.
Tom and Edie sat, unnaturally still and self-contained, watching. There was something about the quality of their attention, as they took in Brian’s dilemma, that disturbed him. He sensed both pity and relish, in which he was half right.
‘Everyone? Listen . . .’ He put a friendly chuckle into the words. Bor, encouraged, gave an extra matey nudge and Brian crashed to the floor.
At this point the swing door was pushed open and Miss Panter, the head’s secretary, showed in two men. One, tall and heavily built, wore a tweed overcoat. The second, slim as a whip, was wrapped in black leather. Only Brian did not recognise the intruders immediately for what they were.
‘Mr Clapton?’
‘Yes.’
The older man came over and showed Brian a card with a photograph on. ‘Chief Inspector Barnaby, Causton CID. We’d like a word, please.’
‘Of course.’ Brian scrambled up awkwardly. ‘What about?’
‘In private.’
The younger man held the door open and Brian followed them out, unaware that his stock had just zoomed from rock bottom to something approaching gilt-edged.
They walked briskly towards the headmaster’s office, Brian, who happened to be in the middle, with the air of a squaddie being escorted to the jail house.
Troy had re-entered the portals of his Alma Mater with a certain swagger but no sense of nostalgia or pride. He had hated school. But, knowing from an early age what he wanted to be when he grew up, he had worked hard at the subjects that bored him as well as the few (social studies, computer science) that, just about, held his interest. He also avoided mixing with any hard-line bunking-off troublemakers. His ferocity at games, which kept him off the sports field almost as much as on, also kept him free of the jeering hassle any consistent attempts at serious study would otherwise have provoked. Now, striding over stained brown haircord down well-remembered corridors he muttered, ‘God, I loathe this place.’
Barnaby had finished his own schooling in the early fifties, before the local grammar had been integrated, but his daughter had been through the comprehensive system, eventually winning an exhibition to Cambridge. The Barnabys had been members of the PTA during her time at ‘this place’ and both had been impressed by the dedication of the teachers - often, it had seemed to them, in the face of overwhelming odds.
‘Cully came here, didn’t she, chief?’
‘That’s right.’ Barnaby spoke abruptly. He had never become indifferent to the wistful leer in men’s voices when they spoke his daughter’s name.
The head, Mr Hargreave, had vacated his office for their purposes and Miss Panter showed them in. Brian took the chair behind the desk, although a two-seater settee and large armchair were both empty. Barnaby, mindful of his earlier experience, sat on the edge of the sofa. Miss Panter returned with a tray of tea and some Garibaldi biscuits. Troy poured out, setting a cup in front of Brian.
‘There you go, Mr Clapton.’
‘What’s all this about?’
Barnaby thought the man’s bewilderment was probably genuine. The murder had not made the one o’clock news and, according to the main office, Brian had received no telephone calls that morning. Troy was taking advantage of the lull to despatch as many Garibaldis as he was able without appearing to push them non-stop into his mouth. He was starving. Parched too (down went the tea), plus, needless to say, desperate for a fag. He caught the chief’s eye and replaced morsel number five on the plate.
‘Delicious,’ he said, opening his notebook. ‘Squashedfly biscuits we used to call them.’
‘I’m afraid,’ began Barnaby, when Brian had finished his tea, ‘that I have some bad news.’
‘Mandy!’ The cup clattered into the saucer, spilling the dregs.
‘No, no.’ Barnaby hastily offered reassurance. ‘Nothing to do with your daughter.’
Troy watched as a little colour crept back into Brian’s deathly countenance. I shall be like that, he thought, when Talisa Leanne starts school. I shall never have a moment’s peace. The insight affected him physically, a cold gripe in the guts. As he struggled to put it aside Barnaby was explaining the reason for their visit.
‘
Gerald!
’ Amazement had barely registered before excited, almost pleasurable, interest took its place. The word ‘gleeful’ might have been appropriate. He said, in a crisp, self-satisfied manner, ‘I myself was with him only yesterday.’
‘We’re aware of that, Mr Clapton.’ Barnaby, who had no time for false displays of grief, had even less time for naked enjoyment in the face of violent death. ‘Could you tell—’
‘It was a most peculiar evening.’
‘Really? In what way?’
‘Tensions. Hidden tensions.’ Brian tossed back long but sparse ginger hair. ‘Visible none the less to a really perceptive person. Which of course, as a writer, one has to be.’
Barnaby nodded encouragingly and sat back to be a bit more comfy. This one was plainly going to run and run.
‘I’m in charge of drama here . . .’
Brian spoke at length and was very frank, as people often are who have little worth concealing. Troy took advantage, resting his Biro, and managed to put away two more squashed-fly biscuits before the chief steered it all back to hidden tensions. Perhaps Mr Clapton could expand?
‘Gerald was behaving very oddly. Unnaturally quiet. And couldn’t wait to get rid of us.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Spent the whole time gushing over our visiting “celebrity”. What a reactionary fossil he turned out to be. Not a clue about contemporary drama. Not surprising, the stuff he churns out.’